As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option available to users is information handling systems. An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing users to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
Many information handling systems contain one or more hard disk drives, and each disk drive will typically include firmware that governs the operation of the disk drive. From time to time, it may be necessary or desirable to update or upgrade the firmware of a disk drive. A firmware upgrade may be desirable to correct errors in or improve the performance of associated hard disk drive. In a networked environment, updates of the firmware of a hard disk drive are often accomplished remotely. In this process, a system administrator or user transmits the firmware update to the hard disk drive and then remotely initiates the update of the firmware of the hard disk drive. Remote updates of firmware often occur on an online basis. As such, the network remains online or in operation during the period that the firmware of a hard disk drive of the network is being updated.
Updating the firmware of a hard disk drive while the hard disk drive is online presents difficulties. The firmware of a hard disk drive is typically saved in flash memory associated with and integral to the hard drive. During the firmware update process, the hard disk drive writes the firmware update to the flash memory location. During the period that the hard disk drive is writing the firmware update to flash memory, the hard drive does not respond to access requests. As a further complication, other elements of the network, including network controllers and host applications, may not be aware that a hard drive has ignored access requests as part of a firmware update processing being performed at the hard disk drive. An attempted access to the hard drive may time out, and one or more network elements may identify the hard disk drive as a failed drive and initiate failover procedures, which may be unnecessary or interfere with the firmware update procedure.
As an alternative to a online firmware update process, the firmware of a hard disk drive may be updated according to an offline process. In a typical offline process, the hard disk drive is removed from the network and the update is performed in a standalone DOS mode. Although an offline update process may reduce or eliminate the risk associated with disk accesses occurring during the firmware update process, an offline update process increases server down time. In addition, the ease of performing an offline firmware update is greatly influenced by the location of the hard disk drive and the configuration of the computing device that includes the hard disk drive. A hard disk drive, for example, may be located in a server that is located in a locked cabinet. In addition, the server may be configured as a so-called headless server. As such, the storage device may not include peripheral input or output devices, such as a keyboard, mouse, video display, or floppy drive, making an offline update of the firmware of the hard disk drive quite difficult. In addition, the offline firmware update process presents a risk of disk corruption. The firmware of the disk drive could be corrupted if a loss of power occurs during the time that the disk drive is overwriting its own operating code. A sudden loss of power could cause the firmware of the hard disk drive to be overwritten and yet only partially updated.